For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel to The Netherlands to talk to another developer of the KDE-PIM realm. Saving both your hands and your email frustrations - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Tom Albers.

For the record: the KMail and other KDEPIM developers applaud Tom's efforts with Mailody. It's important to rethink our applications occasionally and try out new approaches. Mailody uses many of our libraries, as Tom mentioned, which makes them better. Our aim is to share as much code as possible, but Mailody is much more focused than KMail and has very different constraints.

Tom has done a huge amount of work on and for KMail in the past. He was at one point the only person dealing with incoming bug reports and anyone who's ever seen KMail's bug database knows what a gargantuan task that is. Free Software should be fun. Tom has certainly earned the right to do whatever is fun for him having done more than his share of no-fun work for years. The fact that the KDEPIM community benefits from his fun is a pleasant side effect.

(And I'm not saying that because Tom flattered me in his interview. I enjoyed our chat too, Tom, there aren't many people in the world who appreciate the subtleties of sorting emails into threads properly. ;)

The reason is that kmail's design is broken, especially when you consider the way it uses threads (or rather, the way it doesn't use them).
Take a look at this bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41514

Using threads to solve this kind of problems is utterly moronic. All you need to do is run things like spamassassin and gpg as external processes using KProcess, and that will send their output back to KMail as it becomes available, so there will be no freezing and no delay when the external program is done. Oh, and no threads. Threads are for idiots who can't code properly.

I don't understand exactly these words: "After the digiKam development group fell apart..."

Sound like Tom has works on digikam project in the past and he have leave the team. digikam is one of the most important application under Linux and this project is very active. There is a team inside this project...

Well I was part of the digiKam team throughout the time when Tom and Joern were in the team. When Renchi left us, he was aptly replaced by Gilles immediately, I didn't have the notion of a 'team falling apart' at all. When Tom and Joern left even less so. digiKam was going strong at all times thanks to the incredible Gilles Caulier who doesn't get enough praise and mention at KDE.dot.NEWS. He is always in the top-five of the commit statistics.

Anyways, digiKam merits more buzz and talk on KDE.dot. digiKam has been voted be the Linux magazine the 3rd most important application after FF and Amarok.